You can download WinImage and use it for free for 30 days (LINK). It will convert floppy disks to .FLP files and back, so you should be able to write those images out to real floppies if you want. If you just want the files inside the .FLP images, I can pull them out and zip them up separately if you can use them.

Ah! Well I’ll do that on Tuesday since that’s when the library is open. I did manage to get my copies on hard drive thanks to a quick amazon delivery of the portable usb A: drive.

Today I’ve been trying to iron out some inconsistencies between platforms and builder sets. OMG! There are some issues here graphically. It’s to be expected there are differences but the c64 main builder sets are lacking some pictures. At first I thought the blanks were intentional but closely looking the graphical artists got lazy.

Fantasy monsters:
C64 has a blank graphic at the end. This should be a skull of some sort. I’m keeping all masters original so I’ve copied the fantasy and called it Altered Fantasy Set. The master is also missing 4 graphics in the thing graphics at the end. The Apple 2 looks a tad messed up too but after crevasse the dos and Amiga have: some sort of eye, a standing candelabra, a small box chest, and hieroglyphics.
Apple has some eye thing, the standing candelabra, and a pyramid thing (looks sort of like in apple2 Rivers of light. The c64 has blank for those for.

For Apple I did make an altered set and changed the box to represent the one in apple2 ROL. The original looked like an ULTIMA 3 knockoff. And I replaced that ugly pyramid widget with similar hieroglyphics also from ROL (colors are different but it works).

For c64 I Carley drew the eye as closely as I could to the Apple one, I created a similar candelabra, then used ROL small chest and hieroglyphics.

A note to all versions of the fantasy set.
There is Water (impassable) and there are mountains, river, and high mountains. First, I switched the names of the two mountains. The former looked more treacherous and higher than the latter. It appears by default all 3 are accessible to all. I changed this. Huh Mountains I made impassable. River I changed to impassable to all but owner of a horse (yeah, too many westerns I be watching). And Mountains I changed to impassable to all but owner of rope. Now I could have made new treasures like Raft and Climbing gear but I wanted to leave all the items spaces as open as possible. I will make blank sets of each builder that just has graphics. I will also make the fully empty set.

OMFG!! The c64 version of spy-mystery. It’s missing a lot of graphics esp in the creature section. I’d say 3 rows are just blank. And it looks a little lazy. It is also missing the last 3 item graphics.

The c64 science fiction set fares better but still looks incomplete. There are 6 missing monsters and 5 missing items. I had never realized such missing amounts.

For the Apple II I mentioned fantasy. For Science fiction the items might be laxy esp on the last one being just a purple pixel. I can understand they can’t draw a Giant smurf penny like dos for the currency. For the last row I can make out bow, robot (mechtron from MULE?), ...

Ugh each version has something different next. C64 a lightsaber dude, apple2 sort of same guy with no Sabre. DOS has I guess a buck Rogers guy and Amiga a green alien buck Rogers.

Rocket, egg (looks like it’s hatching on apple2) then it’s supposed to be ladder, water planet, then dry dead planet or moon. Well apple2 has uh... maybe a ladder it looks like bleak, a box? A 3d fireplace?, and then that single purple pixel.

So we get to Sci-fi creature sheet. Dos/Amiga last line goes bird creature, big ear gnome, some shepherd or pope, juggernaut like in Archon 2 on wheels, mars, a gollumer from M.U.L.E., alien dog, Venus I guess, mercury or moon, small moon or round satellite.

C64/apple2 bottom row.. bird, helmeted dude, alien thief?, either a phonograph/catapult on wheels or juggernaut (that ends c64). Apple continues: weird puffball alien, spheroid from M.U.L.E., I don’t have a clue for this alien, don’t have a clue for this one either, last two are odd looking robots.

Honestly I will have to reference the Amiga first then DOS then go through to Apple and c64 to try to make them as close as possible graphically. I should go through things and Creatures first and make the spreadsheets and docs detailing. It’s pretty apparent I won’t be able to make them exactly. It’s funny but the c64 displaced beast looks to be the best.

The engines (emulators):
I’ve only tried a few. For c64 I’m using winvice atm (I have used ccs64 but issues happen on win10). For AppleII I am using the latest APPLEWIN. Dosbox for dos and old AmigawinUAE 64bit for Amiga (I know there are better).

Amiga I had issues and some disks I had to remake. That’s annoying. I also get gamepad issues or mouse mess ups at times. I start to think it was a mistake they added mouse support.

At the very least I will zip up the basics for now that should run on the emulators. I never realized that different gaming platforms were so different for the same game. This sort of made it unfair in the competitions unless they sorted that out (back then I guess it was only Apple vs commodore c64).

Mondays, bleh. Had to drop of voting and do many other chores. But the bare minimum of a zip file is up. Or do people want rats or b1 or whatever?

Next we should talk about what emulators to use.
DosBOX for dos or D-Fend seems fine. There is a custom dosbox if using gridcartographer at his website.

APPLEWIN seems great for Apple.

I’m having trouble with winvice64 as it doesn’t seem to recognize other drives. Maybe I need to learn how to create hard disk images instead of d64 disks.

Winuae I’m having difficulty from crashing when trying to switch disks between adventures. This could be when done editing one and going to main menu to edit another; to trying to add another character from another adventure. It’s a bit annoying.

Not sure if I'm understanding your WinVice issue correctly. To swap disks, go to File > Attach Disk Image and then select the drive you wish to insert a virtual disk image into. If ACS supports two drives, you should be able to leave the D64 image of the master disk attached to drive 8 while inserting the game disk into drive 9. If it doesn't support two floppy drives, you'll have to swap the images in and out of drive 8.

I found the manual for the C64 version on Archive.org. It doesn't mention supporting two floppy drives, and does mention that creating an Adventure disk will require disk swapping, so I think that's just the way the program (ACS, not WinVice) was designed.

Yeah that’s what I thought. I used to think that ACS was on Atari 8-bit but that’s an entirely different program.

I probably shouldn’t have included webpages, screeners, and manuals but I figured why not. The Stuart Smith dL is Fracas, Ali-Baba, Heracles, and the Age of Adventure compilation. I’m really thinking of making a Fracas adventure using ACS. It should be simple enough once I play through the game enough times. I don’t think Heracles can be made so easily or Ali-baba but I think they deserve a fair shot.

I’ve been busy and had little time to do much. I did delete everything but graphics on a fantasy set. It leaves you with: trinket, gold, store, wall, floor and maybe something else like door. I had acs make a 15 section adventure. Note there were no monsters made. It was allowed to create what it wanted. ACS only creates treasures I believe (I’ll go back and look later). It created monsters; all in the friendly persons section. It was a mess and they had weird statistics. Maybe I’ll type them up. It looked like a really messed up adventure and I don’t know how any were armed with odd weapons as there were none created to use. Odd.

Anyways, on Apple II here is a picture of Riversof light graphics editor. Note 6 color choices and not 4. Every other (except Amiga) version uses only 4 colors. It’s a cute little graphic glitch or boon for adventure makers. Say you wanted to recustomize science fiction, fantasy, or fantasy; well you could painstakingly use the Rivers of light module and erase everything and start fresh manually putting in graphics from the others but with more color. It’d be a pain to recreate terrain, things, andcreatures but it could be done. It’ll be on my list just for kicks.

I wish the c64 and dos had that little trick of 6 choices for ROL. Ah well. I had a file where I actually redrew the c64 color onto the Amiga.

I still believe the sound for c64 trumps the quartet. I haven’t actually worked the ACK so I don’t know how many tiles that allows. After seeing ULTIMA 4.5 Hey Dude where’s my Avatar! It did make me want to draw up an ULTIMA set for c64. My Pa back in the day had used some already.

Ok, everything is going fine and I’m up to recording graphic names to a list and eventually statistics of each item/space/terrian/creature.
Fantasy.... fine
Science-fiction... fine
Spy/mystery.... fine
Lands of Adventuria..... WTH?!?!

A large portion of the monsters have 0 in all stars, no picture but what appears to be a big blue line, no possessions
Ones affected:
NEUTRAL BEINGS:
Mad Hatter

MONSTERS:
Slime
Vulture Boulder
Giant Werebee

ANIMALS:
Eagle
Unicorn

EVIL BEINGS:
Minotaur
Skeleton
Zombie

MISCELLANEOUS:
(Nothing listed)

Why do I get the feeling this tutorial module was only half finished? The AppleII version is the same. The DOS/AMIGA just omits them completely. Did I enter a time warp and those never existed? I’ll pull out my physical computer and check but I sure hope I don’t have a virus fucking my files. Seems awfully specific though.

Checking regions. Mad hatter appears to be a custom in there. Why there is a master list mad hatter I don’t know.

Checking Deep dank dungeon and found master random list. It appears evil beings are there and some beasts with statistics. I just can’t wrap my head around why master list has no values. I suspect the others like animals, unicorn are randoms for the overworld map with custom statistics. Perhaps it’s a learning aid. Funny it took me like 30 years to notice. Then again, emulation makes it fast and easy to check.

Checking regions. Mad hatter appears to be a custom in there (Alice in wonderland) Why there is a master list mad hatter I don’t know.

Checking Deep dank dungeon and found master random list. It appears evil beings are there and some beasts with statistics. I just can’t wrap my head around why master list has no values. I suspect the others like animals, unicorn are randoms for the overworld map with custom statistics. Perhaps it’s a learning aid. Funny it took me like 30 years to notice. Then again, emulation makes it fast and easy to check.

Edit:
Yep, eagle, Giant werebee, unicorn, vulture boulder are there for world map randoms in their respected terrain along with elf, dwarf, and leprechaun.

Ok... not broken or glitched, just odd listings they removed from later versions. I could remedy and fix all versions if I so wanted.

It could be that all versions of modules have some errors or sort be it laziness on not making graphics, things, or creatures. They certainly don’t all conform to graphic placement exactly so if I decide to make altered versions it might take a bit.

I was examining the chaos device/time machine with Wil’strik the evil in the sci-fi adventure. Well, after reading the big description and trying to go back to the room I got an error that would lock up vice or reset it. Rather odd. I’ll check other squares then boot up ccs64 (not sure latest build). Can’t have freezing/reboots.

It seems to be that if you create a one way portal to another region that has its own custom long message space it will give that error or freeze the program. A bug on emulation but I don’t know if on an actual c64. My old c64 is in storage so I can confirm this.

I didn’t think Stuart stacked a do-all-walk, long message, and one-way portal. Yep you can create it with or without a short message even but it still freezes or gives that error. Kind of sucky but it does this upon examining the square in editor. I will test with play now.

Well, finished the graphics descriptions and tile sheets for c64 best I could. I’ve been wanting to redraw the AppleII since I started this. I’ve created my templates on each tile sheet and am working on the best solid colors for a palette. It actually looks like a striped ribbon for each color for the orange, blue and others. I might have to do that instead of solid colors. It’ll just take longer to paint. It’d be more accurate though. I’ll see as I go.

Finished Apple terrain to a tile set. So, I tried copying graphics from another adventure hoping ROL would keep the 6 colors. NOPE! So much for easy shortcut. So that will be a different drawing project.

Why a ms-paint extra tile set? In case I import to a different construction set, considering ACS is pretty limited.

I had a lot come up this last month including a few very loved pets dying that took the steam out of me esp just before Christmas. Hit me hard but I’m getting over it and indulging in a side trek here for ACS..... the sounds/music.

I knew I had some recorded YouTube music and sounds for c64 acs and temple of Apshai. I finally found them and some sound uh... not great. So, I popped up my WINVICE and started to record. They all sound pretty good I think except my endless sci-fi doesn’t loop right and atm I don’t care to fix it. I added a fade out sci-if as well.

Ok. C64, dos, and AppleII have 30 tracks but I just found out Amiga has 41. Ho ho ho! So while it is fantastic I do think some of the c64 tracks are better or different.

*endless means it loops. Sci-fi is a true endless loop while the others have a pause before replaying. Cool for that I suppose. All loops ended when you hit any other music/sound is played. (Ie a tap, razz, Fugue, etc).

When I record some of these I noticed they have some rough edges like they were rushed. I’ll try to fix that. I’m not fond of winUAE sound recording as I can’t hear sound while recording. So stop watch per song it is before audacity editing.

*endless means it loops. Sci-fi is a true endless loop while the others have a pause before replaying. Cool for that I suppose. All loops ended when you hit any other music/sound is played. (Ie a tap, razz, Fugue, etc).